Archive for January, 2013

Medical illustrators and neurological imaging experts at Johns Hopkins have figured out how night-hunting owls can almost fully rotate their heads — by as much as 270 degrees in either direction — without damaging the delicate blood vessels in their necks and heads, and without cutting off blood supply to their brains. Continue reading →

Updated. Amazon.com’s main website appeared to be down for many visitors for a 45-minute-long period today, with the site returning a mostly blank page that reads “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable.” Continue reading →

A New York-based physician-researcher from Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine, best known for his research into fertility and twinning, has uncovered a potential connection between autism and a specific growth protein that could eventually be used as a way to predict an infant’s propensity to later develop the disease. The protein, called insulin-like growth factor (IGF), is especially involved in the normal growth and development of babies’ brain cells. Based on findings of prior published studies, Touro researcher Gary Steinman, MD, PhD, proposes that depressed levels of this protein in the blood of newborns could potentially serve as a biomarker for the later development of autism. However, this connection, described below in greater detail, has never been directly studied. Steinman presents his exciting theory in the journal Medical Hypotheses. Continue reading →

Super Bowl 2013 is this Sunday, February 3, and UC San Diego Health System has some of its all-star experts ready to answer questions about concussions and injury prevention, as well as current treatment options and typical recovery times if injuries occur.

Throwing more cores at science: high risk for high reward.

Jet noise simulation. An engine nozzle is on the left in gray; exhaust temperatures are in red and orange; sound is represented in blue and cyan.

At the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, a supercomputer named “Sequoia” puts nearly every other computer on the planet to shame. With 1.6 million processor cores (16 per CPU) across 96 racks, Sequoia can perform 16 thousand trillion calculations per second, or 16.32 petaflops. Continue reading →

Sea Launch’s mobile rocket platfrom has arrived in the equatorial Pacific Ocean for the Friday’s launch of the Intelsat 27 communications satellite, a spacecraft to cover the Americas and Europe for media and government customers. Liftoff is set for 0656 GMT (1:56 a.m. EST).

There are great expectations for solar power, especially in the coming years, when the International Energy Agency projects solar to grow faster than any other renewable power. But what does science need to do to more fully respond to the opportunities ahead?Continue reading →

Quantum techniques have been demonstrated to offer improvements in areas such as computing, cryptography, and information processing, among others. But in a new study, researchers from IBM have proven that no quantum trick – no matter how complex or exotic – can improve the capacity of a type of quantum channel that serves as a building block of quantum optical communication systems. Although the result is somewhat surprising and a bit disappointing, it will help guide scientists to explore other ways to enhance channel capacity.Continue reading →

We have seen many concepts, but this is the most realistic plan yet for humanity’s first Moon Base. It will be more efficient and cheaper to build than any other alternative, as it uses 3D printing to quickly transform raw lunar soil into habitable domes. Continue reading →

SUMMARY: Not everyone is drowning in big data or has the know-how to deal with it if they were. Here are six free web services that help mere mortals analyze and visualize their own data.

If you care only about the cutting edge of machine learning and how to manage petabytes of big data, you might want to quit reading now and just come to our Structure:Data conference in March. But if you’re a normal person dealing with mere normal data, you’ll probably want to stick around. Although your data might not be that big or complex, that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth looking at in a new light. Continue reading →